bggrnchvy
Registered Member
After a couple runs on the new front axle I could see that the 38's, crossover and front end travel were giving me a horrible inability to steer in a lot of situations. Hydroassist seemed to be the clearcut answer to remedy this.
I wanted to use my stock pump and at the time I didn't have a welder so I wanted to go single ended for the ram type. I had heard a lot of issue with the 5/8 shaft on the 1.5" rams deflecting and ruining the seal so I wanted to use a 1.75" ram with the larger .75" shaft(stength goes up exponentially as diamteter increaes). I found PSC to be highly recomended and they had just the ram I wanted along with a hardware kit of tabs and heims with it. Stephen at ExpertOffroad gave me a good price as part of a group buy so I made the purchase.
Being that I drive this truck to and from all trails and to work and school a couple times a week I needed to be able to align the toe well at the same time I set the stops at the right place. The only way to get that to work was to get a tie-rod clamp.
I already had a cover on the D60 of AR360 plate built by Jason so I just wanted to weld the tabs to the that. I fired up the welder after a little bit of practice and burned them in.
I also welded the tabs to the tie-rod clamp and put the ram on to make sure it cleared at full extension and compression.
I needed to build a limiter as the 8" travel of the ram will out travel the steering stops on the axle. To get the measurements I fully extended the ram and then ran the steering back to lock the other direction and measured the exposed shaft. I then took a leaf spring bushing I had laying around and cut it to fit with a little extra material to account for compression.
I then needed to get power from the system to the ram, I decided I wanted to drill and tap the box to do that, not buy pre-machined caps. Using Billa Vista's tech article on Pirate I located the spots. I used a split point drill with grease on the tip to collect shavings, then I tapped it to 1/4 NPT and cleaned it up with magnet and by blowing compressed air through the input ports to blow out the hydro output ports.
The other requirements it seems for a hydro assist system with longevity is a cooler, a filter and a reservoir. I didn't like the $175 reservoirs on PSC's website, but I found a unit on Ebay for circle track cars for about $40 shipped. I built a quick mount out of a piece of 1x2 .095wall and a pair of nuts welded to the back with hose clamps and mounted it about the box.
For the cooler, Im in the middle of a transmission swap so I took the stock transmission cooler for the towing package and plumbed it into the return line to the pump using 400psi rated transmission hose, barbed/flared fittings/lines adn hose clamps.
For the filter I ordered a remote transmission unit from Summit and picked up a more compact filter(the larger one was presenting mounting issues) and plumbed it right after the cooler to the pump using the same method.
All thats left is to cap the return on the reservoir, have a -10JIC line made for the reservoir to the pump reservoir, pull the pump and weld a plate with a -10 JIC fitting onto the stock top and have a set of high pressure hyrdo lines made fo rthe box to the ram.
I wanted to use my stock pump and at the time I didn't have a welder so I wanted to go single ended for the ram type. I had heard a lot of issue with the 5/8 shaft on the 1.5" rams deflecting and ruining the seal so I wanted to use a 1.75" ram with the larger .75" shaft(stength goes up exponentially as diamteter increaes). I found PSC to be highly recomended and they had just the ram I wanted along with a hardware kit of tabs and heims with it. Stephen at ExpertOffroad gave me a good price as part of a group buy so I made the purchase.
Being that I drive this truck to and from all trails and to work and school a couple times a week I needed to be able to align the toe well at the same time I set the stops at the right place. The only way to get that to work was to get a tie-rod clamp.
I already had a cover on the D60 of AR360 plate built by Jason so I just wanted to weld the tabs to the that. I fired up the welder after a little bit of practice and burned them in.
I also welded the tabs to the tie-rod clamp and put the ram on to make sure it cleared at full extension and compression.
I needed to build a limiter as the 8" travel of the ram will out travel the steering stops on the axle. To get the measurements I fully extended the ram and then ran the steering back to lock the other direction and measured the exposed shaft. I then took a leaf spring bushing I had laying around and cut it to fit with a little extra material to account for compression.
I then needed to get power from the system to the ram, I decided I wanted to drill and tap the box to do that, not buy pre-machined caps. Using Billa Vista's tech article on Pirate I located the spots. I used a split point drill with grease on the tip to collect shavings, then I tapped it to 1/4 NPT and cleaned it up with magnet and by blowing compressed air through the input ports to blow out the hydro output ports.
The other requirements it seems for a hydro assist system with longevity is a cooler, a filter and a reservoir. I didn't like the $175 reservoirs on PSC's website, but I found a unit on Ebay for circle track cars for about $40 shipped. I built a quick mount out of a piece of 1x2 .095wall and a pair of nuts welded to the back with hose clamps and mounted it about the box.
For the cooler, Im in the middle of a transmission swap so I took the stock transmission cooler for the towing package and plumbed it into the return line to the pump using 400psi rated transmission hose, barbed/flared fittings/lines adn hose clamps.
For the filter I ordered a remote transmission unit from Summit and picked up a more compact filter(the larger one was presenting mounting issues) and plumbed it right after the cooler to the pump using the same method.
All thats left is to cap the return on the reservoir, have a -10JIC line made for the reservoir to the pump reservoir, pull the pump and weld a plate with a -10 JIC fitting onto the stock top and have a set of high pressure hyrdo lines made fo rthe box to the ram.
